eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Purpose - Several studies found negative relationship of uncertainty and consumers' perceived satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to find out whether various search behaviors of consumers are related to uncertainties and able to moderate the relationship between uncertainties and satisfaction.

Design/methodology/approach- A comprehensive model of consumer uncertainty, search behavior and satisfaction is developed using general decision making framework and previous literature study. A set of hypotheses are offered and survey data was collected and tested using several quantitative data analysis tools within SPSS.

Findings -It was found that consumers' uncertainty at different stages of their decision making process influences their choice of search behavior; however, no significant difference within parallel and iterative searching process was found. Search behavior had very little or no significant impact in moderating negative relationship between consumers' uncertainty and perceived satisfaction.

Research limitations- The data were collected from customers of Finland who are technologically advanced, which somewhat limits the generalizability of the findings. Furthermore, the data are collected some years ago and one must be careful in reasoning our findings to present online travel purchase.

Managerial implications - It will help tourism marketers and developers of decision support system (DSS) to better understand the consumers' decision making process. Therefore, the finding can help managers to identify uncertainties of consumers' decision making process and reduce them by providing appropriate information and capabilities.